Friday, May 16, 2014

The ALR - (potential) Farmland, not Holy Land

Local agriculture cannot feed Southwest
BC. It can potentially provide a small, but significant, portion
of it, but it will never support the population. This shouldn’t surprise anyone; back in 2006 the government found BC as a whole was about 48% self-reliant for food. Feeding the densest corner of the
province from local farms? Ain’t gonna
happen.

This farm would feed those towers for about two minutes

First off, what is local food? The Canadian Food Inspection Agency defines it as such (it is noted this is an interim description and subject to a review).

food produced in the province or territory in which it is sold, or

food sold across provincial borders within 50 km of the originating
province or territory

The problem with that definition is BC is
big. No seriously, BC is REALLY FREAKING
BIG. Like it would be the 32nd largest
country in the world big (larger than Venezuela, Turkey or France). Saying all food produced within BC (or parts
of AB/Yukon) is local to Vancouver is insane.
Los Angeles is closer to Vancouver than the northwest corner of the
province.

The previous definition was

the food originated within a 50 km radius of the place
where it was sold, or

the food sold originated within the same local government unit (e.g. municipality)
or adjacent government unit

That’s more local for sure. CFIA says this is not representative of how
things work today. I don’t totally buy that,
but I would say local food is somewhere in between those two definitions,
somewhat closer to the old one.

So to pick a number out of nowhere, let’s
say local food is food that originates from a 100 km radius. Fits nicely with all those hipsters doing
their 100 km (or is it mile?) diet.
Very, very VERY broadly speaking, someone on a North America needs about 1-1.2 acres of farmland to keep them fed. If we take Southwest BC to include

Metro Vancouver

Fraser Valley Regional District

Squamish and Whistler

The Capital, Cowichan and Nanaimo Regional Districts

we need to feed roughly 3.35 million
people, requiring (very) roughly 3.35 million acres of farmland. How much farmland do we have within 100 km of
those regions?

708,890 acres. Sounds like a few of us are going
hungry. Now this is just the land in the
Agricultural Land Reserve – I’m assuming all farmable land is captured in
there. Not true, but should be close
enough for our purposes.

It gets worse. Of the 708,890 acres of ALR land near
southwest BC, only 287,000 acres of it is Class 1-4 in ALR terms, which is land
suitable to growing food crops (and it ain’t easy on class 4 land). Now the one acre per person assumption does
account for the fact that lower quality land can potentially be used for
grazing animals, so we don’t need to evacuate everyone just yet, but numbers are clear. There is nowhere near enough local farmland
to support Southwest BC. There are too
many people. Assuming all 708,000 count to the one-acre-per-person, local agriculture can feed ~20% of southwest BC currently, down to ~15% in 2040.

Even worse worse, farming is highly
regionalized. From the reliance report,
“For example, grains and oilseeds are produced primarily in the north, beef
ranching occurs mainly in the Interior, the majority of tree fruits are
produced in the Okanagan, dairy is concentrated in the Fraser Valley and north
Okanagan, and the major production area for small fruits and vegetables is in
the Fraser Valley.” We’re not getting
grains, meat, or tree fruits locally in any real quantity.

What if we expand our “local” radius to 500
km? That gets us up to 1.1 million acres
of Class 1-4, or 2.7 million acres of everything. We also get another 350,000 mouths to feed,
but it’s still a net gain, and we get those lovely Okanagan peaches. However, it’s still nowhere near enough,
especially when we project 30 years into the future where we’re probably
looking at over five-million people in the area.

So when we’re told local agriculture is
necessary for our food security, it’s a false bill of goods. No matter what, Southwest BC will be reliant
on importing the vast majority of our food from out of our region, if not out
of our country. Increasing density will
only worsen the problem.

Should we go with the interim definition of
local, where the whole province is considered local to itself? That’s pretty dubious. One of benefits of local food is short
distance to market. This is supposed to
mean you get fresher food, less preservatives, and it’s less transportation
intensive.

In the debate I constantly hear a whine of
“why are we buying our food from California, when we could be buying it
locally.” Well, our largest chunk of ALR
land, including Class 1-4, is in the Peace Region, centred around Fort St.
John. How far away is Fort St.
John? A little over 1,200 km. Going the
other direction, this takes us a little south of Redding, California, not too
far from Sacramento. That chunk of
farmland near Fort Nelson? Farther away
than San Francisco.

Apparently, this is local agriculture

Worse worse worse. This is the description of farmland near Fort
St. John, BC from Integrated Land Management BC,
“Cold winters, short growing seasons and low precipitation limit the
vegetation, agricultural crops and forest ecosystems that can thrive here.” Limited crops and short growing seasons. The 1 acre per person was estimated based on
New York State farmland, with growing seasons of 150-200 days. While we get that in Southwest BC, the
growing season in the Peace region is near, and often less than, 100 days.

In order to grow, plants need sun, soil, air, water and snow.

In season food? Sure, for three months of the year. The rest of the time we’re eating
preserves. So much for that benefit. California’s growing seasons? 250 days plus, depending on where you
are. Our choice is fresh, in-season
produce from 1,200 km away 9+ months of the year from California, or fresh,
in-season foods from 1,200 km away for 3 months of the year from BC. And that’s not even getting into variety of
foods.

Would local preserved food be better than
shipped in fresh? Well, it takes as much
energy to run your chest freezer for a year as it would to ship the 2,000
pounds of food you eat per year from San Francisco on a semi-truck (the least
efficient form of transport), and then there are all the nutritional losses
from preservation, so I’d say we’re better off with the latter. Especially since for Southwest BC, it won’t
be local either way – ship in fresh food, or ship in preserved food? It’s a no brainer to me. Particularly since the Peace region is
generally focused on grains, so we’re getting some form of processed food from
them regardless.

Furthermore, if ALR land is critical for
food security, why are we using it for non-food purposes? Over 10,000 acres of land in BC are devoted
to vineyards and wineries. I like a
glass of nice wine as much as the next fellow, but for the purpose of food
security that land may as well not be in the ALR. Same story for horses and Christmas tree
farms. In 2001, non-food use of farmland
totaled 370,000 acres. So what can we do to reduce the reliance on
distant food?

Eat less food. It would do
most of us some good.

Promote more home agriculture.
While we will never live primarily off it, we can supplant our diets
with home gardens.

Eat more meat. This is ironic
as I was taught growing meat is bad and wasteful and is much more land
intensive than crops. It is, but many kinds
of animals can pasture on land and crops that aren’t suitable for humans.

Annex northern Washington.
Seattle might complain, but they’ll all be too stoned to do anything
about it.

Irrigation. We are blessed
with tremendous water resources in BC.
Perhaps we can leverage that to expand the amount of high quality
farmland we can use. I know it’s never
just that simple, but it’s worth asking have we taken advantage of this where
we can? The self-reliance report
indicated we will need a significant increase in irrigated lands to just
maintain the current level of reliance.

But even if we did all that, we will never
be anywhere close to supporting the local population with local food. Taking away a few acres of Class 7 land in
Fort Nelson is not going to alter the food situation in BC – Southwest or as a
whole. Heck, taking away all the ALR
land in northern BC isn’t going to alter the fundamental equation for Southwest
BC – we already must and forever will need to import most of our food to
Vancouver and Vancouver Island.

Should we remove all the land then? No, but we need to accept that once a piece
of land is designated as part of the ALR, it is not deified and never
touchable for anything else ever again.
Food is only one of humans’ key needs.
We need shelter, activity, and community among other things. It may well be better for the city, the
province and for the people for some land currently in the ALR to be used for
something else. Non-farming usage make this the case for over 3% of the ALR already.

We can't meet our needs locally, so we should be focused on how to maintain a secure, stable food supply in spite of that. Food security is generally defined along the lines of “the
state of having reliable access to a sufficient quantity of affordable,
nutritious food.” Giving someone affordable shelter or a well-paying job may be
the best way for some ALR land to provide food security.